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1.5.9-Espretell
Brick!Club - 1.5.9: Madame Victurnien’s Victory Alright, it’s my first time Brick!Clubbing, and it’s one of my favorite chapters, too! Let’s get to it! It’s difficult to blame the overseer woman for what happened to Fantine, really. She did give her 50 francs, which seems like it was a lot of money to Fantine. Nevertheless, Fantine blows through it by paying off debts to assholes. “You’re young and pretty, you can find some way to pay,” is a terrible thing to say straight to someone’s face! Especially if he was implying that she would eventually become the prostitute that we all know she is going to be. Makes me furious every time I read it. Then we get Fantine’s “lessons in poverty,” which just sound brutal. I still don’t understand how Fantine isn’t dead after that first winter. Then Hugo rubs salt on the wound by telling us that it would’ve been better if Cosette had been there with her. It’s an interesting question to consider - would those 10 sous a day meant the difference between Fantine being in debt or not? Could Cosette have lived a richer life with Fantine? Looking forward, would living with Valjean have been ultimately a better life for her? We just don’t know, and the reader doesn’t know quite how terribly Cosette is living until later anyways. Fantine is so, so alone that it’s just crushingly sad. Obscurity being a shelter, as it’s worded in my FMA, is such an important aspect of Fantine’s story. Even the old woman that helps her through poverty is never described as a confidante or even a friend. She’s forced to love her daughter from afar and pretend to herself and everyone else that it isn’t painful. I don’t know how much better Paris would have been for her, but I think that there would have been at least someone there who would have befriended and helped her. At least she would have had dignity. Finally, Victor Hugo proves his unimaginably subtle use of foreshadowing with the worsening cough and the lovely hair. The thing with the foreshadowing is that even when we know it’s coming, it still kills us inside. TL;DR: “Life’s a bitch,” - Victor Hugo, probably Commentary Pilferingapples Welcome welcome! Gosh, we’re getting a lot of new people- the end of the semester sending us students with sudden free time, maybe? However it’s happening, I love it! The “you’re young and pretty” thing isn’t so much a statement that Fantine could take up prostitution as an invitation to, y’know, pay off her debts with a substitute currency. So, yes, prostitution, but on a very personal one-on-one level. :/ And I don’t know how someone gets through a winter that has snow and stuff with no heat either! Fantine doesn’t even have someone to share body heat. It’s not like her clothes are any great shakes either. HOW DO PEOPLE BE COLD AND NOT DIE, I don’t even know (and now we know why I never leave Texas). We DO know Cosette’s living horribly, though! I don’t see how her being with Fantine could have been worse. Cosette’s already starving, underclothed, and abused; with Fantine she might still have been cold and hungry but at least there would have been love. And with her reputation ruined there’s no reason for Fantine to NOT have Cosette, except I guess she can’t leave town somehow with debts? I AM A MODERN AMERICAN THIS DOES NOT MAKE SENSE HELP. Did guards stop people at the gates of town and check their papers for…debt notices, or something? How does this work?